We've seen a number of examples of why giving Meta's Muse app full disk access to your Mac is a very bad idea, and yet another major privacy issue has recently been discovered. It's now been found that Muse analyzes your communication with everyone in your life on an hourly basis. Apple is rightly concerned about the development, and in a blog post says that it will be introducing additional controls around the Full Disk Access feature that's been enabling the problems.
Meta recently launched its Muse Personal AI Agent for iPhone and Mac. Despite the obvious inadvisability of giving a Meta app unfettered access to everything on your Apple devices, the app quickly jumped to the top of the App Store. Predictably, things started to go wrong, with Wired reporting that security researcher Karan Joshi found Meta had instructed Muse to extract all of the information needed to construct a complete map of all of your relationships. One of Muse's instructions appears to be the ability for it to create 'a page for every person in the user's life.' This hourly process involves compiling data on family, partners, friends, colleagues, 'collaborators,' and people you 'follow,' the instructions say.
Apple tightening use of Full Disk Access. You would think a permission prompt to give an app 'full disk access' to your Mac would be self-explanatory, but it appears not. Even tech-savvy people have been granting this access-all-areas pass to their machines without appreciating just how dangerous a step it is. Apple says the feature was intended for backup apps, but developers are now using it for many more things, including AI agents. The company has said it intends to 'introduce additional controls' to ensure users fully understand what they are doing if they grant this permission. Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action.
Source: 9to5Mac · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing